A Mass-Produced Saint and the Tired, Dusty Pilgrimess

The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion. Sonja Livingston. University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 184 pp. $17.95 (paper).

As a vehicle for exploration, the spiritual memoir gives us two worlds, one of facts and things and one of the transcendent; its work is in demonstrating how to pass from the one to the other, moving through imagination. Writers of this genre have brought readers along on that journey since Augustine wrote his Confessions, the spiritual autobiography of his sinful life in the fourth century (quite fun to read) and how he arrived at a turning point. This examination of his errors, a confession, cleanses him, re-creates him, and offers a model for other believers—and for writers, including female mystics such as the fifteenth century’s Margery Kempe.

Kempe’s own travels offer a better path for modern women’s spiritual writing: not the linear chronology of an entire life looked back on but a series of journeys studded with vivid details. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson describe in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), “Kempe co-constructed the story of a subject in dialogue with a god who commanded her attention to the signs of his wonders. This version of life narrative offered a destiny and an itinerary for self-location.” By the mid–twentieth century, working to rejuvenate a religious devotion that he saw as falling to the wayside, Jesuit theologian Hugo Rahner was calling the church itself a “tired, dusty pilgrimess.” It’s appropriate that Livingston notes this in the preface of her latest collection of linked essays, The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion, as she in turn sets out to find the signs of God’s wonders. The steps in Livingston’s search for the particular plaster saint of her title, a statue she remembers from a childhood church, create a narrative frame interspersed with the more concrete aspects of Catholicism she attends to along the way: relics, communion, holy water and wells, documented miracles, and the stories of nuns and priests.

In her first memoir, Ghostbread (University of Georgia Press, 2009), Livingston describes being on the road as a way of life, so central that on the cover of my copy is a long white station wagon parked in front of a wall that suggests, “Why Not Now.” That memoir, a series of exquisite microessays, takes us from Livingston’s conception through frequent moves with her mother and six siblings—“Like other people celebrated holidays, we packed our stuff and moved”—to her rebellious years in high school. Within these essays, her mother is the constant, but the Catholic church seems to be the place the family loops from and returns to; in microessay 70, Livingston notes that the “body of Christ” is both her school and her church, Corpus Christi, and only after offering that translation of the Latin name of her church does she trace this origin to her baptism, which was, of course, her mother’s decision: “My mother’s Catholicism ran hot and cold. In fairness to Rome, the religion she practiced should have had its own name. It glorified mystery, but resisted authority. She opposed birth control, for instance, but had a certain appreciation for sex outside of marriage, and sex in general.” In particular, Livingston feels this connection to Corpus Christi in Rochester, where Livingston was baptized and where she has a sense of ownership: “Because I had returned to the church before my mother, I behaved as though I’d discovered the place or built it myself, stone by stone.”

She returns to Corpus Christi, literally, in the essays of The Virgin of Prince Street, starting with a late Christmas mass with her husband “after a candlelight vigil at his parents’ Presbyterian church. The simple elegance of the service had been a good match for my head, but the tangled mess of my heart longed for something else,” a desire that takes the shape of a familiar plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, perhaps partly because that statue is missing.

She and her husband recognize that “a statue was shorthand for many things—differences in religious backgrounds, for instance, as well as a certain willingness to deviate from logic where devotion is concerned.” She is at pains to explain that illogical devotion, which becomes the pivot of her collection. She goes back on the road again, drawn to Quebec, to Ireland, to Santa Fe, sites of processions and festivals where believers congregate, but she also searches less celebrated spots, like southern Louisiana, where Father Champagne drives his mobile confessional, a converted ambulance. The suggestion that a sacred space can go on the road makes the church itself a pilgrim; it counters the symbolism inherent in church architecture: that this religion is unchanging, its cathedral spires reaching up to the heavens and dwarfing the humans inside to remind them of humility, plaster saints their closest contact.

When Chaucer’s pilgrims set off to thank Thomas Becket at his shrine in Canterbury, the Church (and there was only one then) was flourishing. They knew there would be other pilgrims on the road; in fact, that’s how Chaucer gets the disparate group together in the first place, by chance gathering at an inn. Sonja Livingston’s pilgrimage in The Virgin of Prince Street is more of a quest; though she seeks and finds others who help her, they seem to be somewhat further ahead on the road. Her friend Mary, for example, has such faith in miracles that before she agreed to marry her sweetheart in the 1950s, she made a three-hundred-mile pilgrimage to ask for Saint Joseph’s approval (and got it). And in Louisiana, Miss Evangeline from the ambulatory Spiritual Care Unit “flits around the parking lot, all blonde hair and hey y’alls. She uses her boundless enthusiasm to coax people into the confessional,” even nudging a reluctant Livingston herself with “What better way to observe than from inside.” For both women, faith is a given, the ground they stand on; they’ve already welcomed some of the signs and wonders Livingston still seeks.

“There is no more perfect consecration than attention,” Livingston tells us. “We elevate what we behold.” It is rather extraordinary that she is also able to elevate much that we do not behold, things invisible until she puts them into words, as well as those that go missing: her stolen communion gifts, the Virgin Mary from her childhood, the dwindling of the flock of faithful Catholics, and the resultant closure of so many churches that had filled the landscape.

I should say here that I’m somewhere on a sliding scale between conservative and orthodox Judaism myself. Schooled in the prohibition against taking a graven image for a deity, I’ve generally tried to look at statues and paintings of saints or Mary or Jesus as examples of art or (if mass produced) as tchotchkes. To be honest, it’s painful to see some of them, knowing that in Chaucer’s time, my people were excluded, were considered infidels, that the anti-Semitism evident then persists today in graffiti and hate crimes. Livingston reminds me that Catholics were persecuted too, whether the expulsion of the Cajuns from Canada 250 years ago or, before that, a mob “roving through Antwerp in August 1566, in what will come to be known as the Beeldenstorm (statue storm), men going from church to church with axes, mocking the statues of the Holy Family before pissing on them and bashing in their faces.”

Of course that mob in Belgium believed the statues have power; otherwise, there would have been no point in such desecration. We understand that power because of Livingston’s attention to that moment and to its opposites—the altar girl whose vitality outshines the chalices on the altar, the joy blossoming after a young father tussles with a Freeze Pop for his little girl: “Gratitude [ . . . ] writes itself so fully onto their faces that it’s impossible to tell who has given and who has received.” It’s lovely to have those moments of transcendence in the book, which are earned by candor, both about the flaws of the church today and about Livingston’s own limits—so zealous in her quest she chides herself for having become “a woman who looks at statues instead of people.” The essays and her spiritual quests within them are also leavened by humor: she describes her decision to give up the search as an “enlightened capitulation and profound letting go. It was deep and mature and lasted about an hour.”

Livingston’s devotion brings history into the present: a church takes on the layers of every event and individual it has held, both “plate upon endless potluck plate of ambrosia salad and chicken French” and the “bloom of Saint Anthony’s face, his sheaf of plaster lilies, the way he holds the Child year after year without ever buckling at the knee.” And there Livingston is, too, her presence transformed into words, her words transporting us into her vision, a loop where life is “constantly dying and being reborn, this sacred heartbreaking world.”

Read more from Issue 17.1.